Sin City

This past week I went to a very dark place, perhaps the darkest recess of my Peace Corps experience thus far. As I’ve become more and more integrated into my community the people have started to open up more and more to me. Several señoras have brought me into their circles of social knowledge (i.e. chisme), and have shared with me some of the most intensely personal experiences a person can share. They share with me their stories of suffering, the suffering of others, the hatred that others have for them, and the hatred that they have for others. Relationships of all sorts in the community are truly toxic.

Last weekend one of the movies that happened to be playing on the 2 channels that we get out here in the campo was Sin City, and although I didn’t realize it while I was watching it, I realized this week that Paraguay is its own metaphoric version of Sin City. Its many warring factions are not kept in check by the rule of law because most law-enforcers and other holders of power are indeed members of the various warring factions and are at liberty to use said power as a weapon when necessary (with little or no consequences if they play the game correctly).

On Wednesday after having a conversation with a teacher that I know, I was shocked and saddened by a story she told me. A very capable and intelligent young teacher with a toddler son, she applied for an open job at a nearby school. She won the position (winner is determined by the Ministry of Education based on resume/ability/interview/etc.), but because she refused to sleep with a person in a position of power at the school, he and his family mounted a huge campaign against her, spreading rumors about her, getting signatures on a petition, holding tiny “demonstrations” against her, and exploiting her disability (due to a moto accident, the woman walks with a limp), claiming that it would impede her from performing her teaching duties. His goal was to get her kicked out of the position she had just won. Several people who I know in the community turned against her and did and said horrible things. The first day that she was supposed to go to work, she received threats by text message from one of my neighbors (who by the way, was 8 months pregnant with a married man’s baby at the time), who said that if she tried to go into the classroom, she and other members of her family would drag her out “by her hair, kicking and screaming” if necessary. She was too terrorized by the threat of violence to go to school that day. (And indeed, the “protestors”- mainly family members of the director and community members with personal vendettas against the woman- had gathered and were stationed outside the school.)

She had often had opportunities to get a job in the nearby school, but had always refused to sleep with the director. She told him, “No, if I get a job here it’s going to be because I deserve it, not because I slept with somebody.”  He said “Then keep on dreaming, sweetheart.” Finally, her day came, and she won the job legitimately. In the end, he still got her kicked out and put somebody else in the position. “I always knew I would never be able to keep the job,” she told me. “The director is too powerful. He has too many friends in high places in the Ministry.” And it’s true. All it really would’ve taken is one or two phone calls and she would’ve been out, period.

I had heard many versions of this story from different “players” in the community (chisme is, of course, the national sport in Paraguay, people often joke). I’ve also heard some other stories recently about things people have done to other people. And yesterday I just went into a very pensive state, wanting desperately to understand what makes people feel that it’s O.K. to treat each other the way that they do. It’s like we are lost here; it’s as though there are no guiding values or sense of morality. Even I sometimes feel as though I am drowning in a sea of confusion, losing myself, desperately trying to grasp onto those Sunday school values that have always guided me through life… and finding that they are useless and cannot keep me afloat in this Sin City-like society in which I seem to find myself. When you live in Sin City, maintaining such “Sunday School” values can leave you completely at the mercy of others, meaning that at best you are powerless, but at worst, you become a victim of human nature’s worst.

It’s a metaphor because in Sin City, the war is real, physical. When you lose, you die a real, physical death; your major organs go one-by-one and all your vital signs stop. In Potrero Baez, the war is mainly social/psychological. When you lose, you die a no less real, but social & emotional death. And more often than not, it isn’t a sudden-death, but a long, slow, process of pain and suffering that lasts a lifetime. Like they say: As soon as you’re born, you start to die, and you keep dying your entire life.

And that is how the game is played, ladies and gentlemen. Life in rural Paraguay is a minefield of social foibles (starting with who you’re born to) that can make or break your ability to avoid extreme social/psychological/economic/physical suffering… but the reality is that the social war is constant, nobody is safe, and nobody goes untouched. At some point, everybody is excluded, everybody is abused, everybody is used… and if you refuse to exclude, abuse, and use, then You. Lose.

What really shocks me is that not only is there no practice of good and ethical values (honesty, integrity, compassion, responsibility, love, respect, equality, etc.)… but there really is not even a rhetoric, a pretense, or even the most minimal consideration for those values. They are considered useless, period. One who adheres to them is naïve, period. One must become letrado (i.e. understand the rules of the REAL game) as soon as possible, in order to survive, period. There is no time or use for Sunday School chatter in a dog-eat-dog world. Nobody pretends to be good- the most they try to do is show that others are worse than they are.

Morality here is an option, a luxury, that is often only comfortably available to those who do not know necessity. And those who do not know necessity are precisely those who are MOST likely to abuse their relative power to get what they want, when they want it. No ethical or moral scruples to worry about.

Welcome to Sin City… my house is the 3^rd one on the right.

“So many soldiers on the other side… I take their lives so they can’t take mine.”   (Avenged Sevenfold, “M.I.A.”)